Tiernan Ray
Snap Inc.’s latest iteration of its Spectacles glasses probably never should have seen the light of day.
The first version of Specs notoriously flopped, resulting in $40 million write-down. The new model makes slight improvements, but there remains no obvious use case for the glasses.
The good news about the latest Specs is that you can actually take photos with them. Snap , which calls itself a “camera company,” only allowed users to take videos with the prior model.
Still, there’s not much use for the photos and videos you do take with Version 2. You can send them to a friend on Snapchat or post them to a Snapchat story, but one supposed novelty of Spec footage is that you see a different frame depending on whether you’re holding your phone horizontally, vertically, or somewhere in between. It’s cute, in theory, and the concept works well enough within Snapchat if you know to try it out, but this 360-degree mode means that the videos look ridiculous if you export them outside the app.
Try messaging a Spec shot to a friend via a normal text, for example, and you get a circular image on a white background. Not exactly the sort of thing you want to send around.
After trying the new Specs over the past few weeks, I’m still not clear when they’d come in handy. The concept of a hands-free camera is nice, but you don’t have much say over what does and doesn’t make its way into your shot, given that there’s no viewfinder. Your frame is just what you see ahead of you. When I tried taking videos at my sister’s recent tennis match, I got too much of the surroundings when I really would’ve liked to be able to zoom or crop the shot as I would have if I’d just used my iPhone’s camera.
Snap probably intends for the new Specs, which came out a month ago, to appeal to its core Gen-Z users who spend half an hour a day or more Snapping away, but there’s not much that makes the glasses worth their $150 price tag even to this group. Perhaps Specs would be useful to record footage at concerts, but that’s contingent on the show’s being outside and in daylight. Otherwise you’re wearing sunglasses in the dark.
The Specs are splash-proof and can capture shots “in shallow water,” and the company is hoping they’ll resonate with young people attending pool parties, judging from Snap’s site. The underwater camera actually did a decent job in our tests, but it’s hard to see teens and college kids paying up for the right to take underwater Snaps. At least GoPro Inc. footage is useful elsewhere.
And while it might seem fun at first to turn up poolside wearing Snapchat glasses, other people might be unsettled that you’re effectively filming them with a secret camera. (Specs light up when you’re taking a video or photo, but for the uninitiated it’s doubtless easier to tell that someone’s taking a photo of you when they’re clearly holding up an iPhone than when a light pattern appears on a pair of sunglasses.)
Other slight improvements involve the Specs’ color palette. The original models were in tacky, bright, solid colors. The new Specs come in somewhat more muted shades, and they’re translucent, which makes them look a bit more like normal glasses. Only a bit, though, because the Specs kept their big, circular frames, and in that sense they look a whole lot like the prior model.
Snap is reportedly interested in coming out with a Version 3 of the Specs with an all-new form factor. The new model would have two cameras and an aluminum design, according to a report by Cheddar earlier this year. The report indicated that Snap planned to launch such a design in 2019.
Whether or not that’s the case, it’s puzzling that Snap released the second-gen Specs at all, given that the glasses only provide incremental improvements to a product that was a total bust. Hardcore Snap loyalists may have paid up for the first version, but many of those devices have likely found permanent homes in sock drawers. Mine have. There’s not enough new in the second iteration to warrant spending the money on a new pair and also not enough new about them to convince people who were wary the first time around to fork over $150 now.